Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
I'm done apologizing for ...
- Thread starter Munjibunga
- Start date
Most likely - but I get my definition of "descriptivism" from the various professors of linguistics I have worked under, who are self-described descriptivists.
Here's a relevant and recent blog post on the matter - be sure to check the comments underneath (if you're interested!):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3951
The "disinterested" vs "uninterested" example was pulled from an online rant by a self-described "unapologetic prescriptivist". I can't find the original now, but here's a lighter article intended for the general reader that uses it to make the case for some degree of prescriptivism to preserve effectiveness:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/04/the_nonplussed_problem.html
I'm interested, but many of the comments seem to be of the form "that person isn't using the term in the way we choose to define it, therefore their argument is invalid" ... which seems somewhat prescriptivist in itself. The further reading links at the end of the main article look like they could lead to a happy afternoon's reading though.
FWIW, I hit up the OED and it gives:
"descriptivism: [...] 2. Ling. The practice or advocacy of descriptive linguistics"
"descriptive: [...] 2b Ling. Describing a language as it is, avoiding comparison or prescription" (emphasis mine)
There you go - descriptivism is the act of studying a language without imposing an external idea of how it "should" be. It doesn't invalidate prescriptivism, it is just a separate way of dealing with language - not opposed to it.
I don't see what the problem is with descriptivists having a clear agenda about their field of study. No one who is a descriptivist has ever come out and said "prescriptivism is wrong". What is often said is that prescriptivists generally bring up bogus arguments to justify their positions. Having the view that a particular issue should be one way or another is fine - but prescriptivists are usually not logical or consistent in their arguments.
Take disinterested vs. uninterested for example. You pointed out that there is a loss of distinction. You may be right. If that's the case, then wouldn't prescriptivists be supportive of changes in a language that increased available distinctions? Instead, I have noticed that prescriptivists never seem to advocate any sorts of changes in a language - they would typically prefer that language not change at all. But they hide this preference in pseduo-logical arguments that support older forms.
Descriptivists don't say language should or shouldn't change. They don't say distinctions or lack thereof are either good or bad. They look at what a language is, and what it has, and examine how it works. That's all they do.
The assumption that descriptivists make is that ALL languages, from the most formal to the most casual, are detailed and complex systems with internal structures that can be compared to each other, and all fully capable of expressing whatever a speaker wishes to say. Prescriptivists seem to not believe this to be true for at least some forms of language. I think this is where the real difference lies.
The subtitle of that article is "How long should we cling to a word's original meaning?" That's a good question. Modern English derived, over millennia, from a series of languages, going back to Proto-Indo-European somewhere around 8-10,000 years ago - but of course that's not the end (beginning) of it, because PIE certainly descended from some other language. We would have enough trouble understanding a speaker of Old English - it's different enough from Modern English to qualify as an entirely different language - never mind if we want all the way back to PIE or even further in the past. EVERY word in the English language has changed meaning - where is the "original" meaning of any word to be found? Typically, for prescriptivists, it's whichever "traditional" meaning they personally wish to hang on to.
I'm not apologizing for not using these things all the time , ? . ! rambling on it a thread post when I think it needs to be done yeah I did not use any of those up there ha ha ha
You know, if he had just said, "But if this ever-changing world in which we're living ..." the world would be perfect.
Malory Archer: Because you learned nothing from it.
Sterling Archer: I learned that "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.
Lana Kane: Wait, what?
Munjibunga said:
Without doing any research* on it, my "descriptivist" take on it would be that in- is a fairly common adjectival prefix in English which converts an adjective into a negative form. Insensitive/sensitive, inconceivable/conceivable, etc. So interpreting "inflammable" as "not flammable" is pretty much to be expected.
* One of the key elements of descriptive linguistics is basing conclusions on data collected in research. I haven't done any research on this myself but it has come up in classes I've taken, so I'm basing this partly on my memories of discussions that I've been part if in the past.
